Daughters of Belgravia; vol 2 of 3

“Zai! do you really love me so very much?”

She lets both white arms form a circle for his neck, and woos him to touch her red lips.

For one moment she forgets her maidenly reserve, and only remembers that in her own eyes she is his wife – in heart, if not in name.

“Oh Carl! Carl! let us marry at once – dear! and then no one can come between us two!”

“We cannot!” he says hastily.

Zai starts as if she were shot, and covers her face with her two little hands, while a burning blush surges over it.

It comes to her suddenly, the terrible, terrible shame, of her having asked – of his rejection – and then the colour leaves her cheek.

She leans against the balustrade, with the moonlight falling on a face white as undriven snow. Her eyes have a dumb misery in their depths, and her mouth quivers like a child’s.

“Oh Zai! forgive me if I hurt you by saying we cannot marry!” he whispers brokenly, for her white face and trembling lips move him strangely, worldling as he is. “You know very well how I am placed! I have nothing but my salary, and that is dependent on health; and if I don’t marry some girl with money, I don’t know what will become of me, Zai!”

A deep silence ensues for a minute or two. Up above the glorious moon sails serenely along, and a few feathery clouds float athwart the great sapphire plain of sky. From within, the sound of music is carried out on the fragrant night, but human eyes and human voices are nowhere near.

These two are alone, entirely alone, on this isolated balcony, and they have for many months played at making love.

Listen then in what passionate words Belgravians and worldlings say farewell, if farewell must be said by them.

We all know that Romeo and Juliet would not have said it, but they were foolish inconsequent young people, who fortunately did not live to test the agreeabilities of a narrow income.

“Then I suppose you are going to marry Miss Meredyth?” Zai asks in a low voice, that has a hardness in it which no one has heard before.

“Zai! can you blame me? Can you think it possible for me to act otherwise?”

“No! I don’t blame you!” and again bitterness mars the sweet voice.

“Of course you cannot blame me!” he answers, “for you know you are forbidden fruit, Zai. You have been reared in certain social conditions, which of course it would be sheer wickedness on my part to ask you to resign!”

This is a very different sentiment to what he has expressed before; and even she, much as she loves him, feels indignant.

There is a sudden flash in her grey eyes as she lifts them to his.

“You know that you ought not to say this, Carl! It is not my interests you are thinking of, but you have made up your mind not to marry anyone who has no money!”

“Granted!” he replies quietly, though a crimson flush dyes his face, and he bites his lip hard. “But though you seem to reproach me, you know why it is so! You know that people in your world cannot subsist on sentiment, or on a few paltry hundreds a year. I am, I avow, one of those miserable devils to whom the bitter irony of fate has given the tastes and habits of a gentleman, without the means of supporting them. You are the corresponding woman. Common sense – the commonest sense – will tell you whether or not it would be sheer madness for us two to marry, although we love each other so passionately, Zai!”

Zai does not answer. There cannot be the least doubt, she knows, but that common sense does tell her that marriage with her would not suit Carl Conway; but it is none the less true that common sense is not what she cares to listen to now. In the most vapid soul that sojourn in Belgravia ever starved, there is still some small lodging left for that divine folly that men call “Love.”

And Zai, born and bred in Belgravia, is as desperately and honestly in love with this man, who has played fast and loose with her, as a milk-maid could be.

She longs – how she longs – for just one crumb of comfort, just one little word of sweetness from his lips.

Only a quarter of an hour ago he held her to him and kissed her with apparently the old, old passion in his soul, and now he stands a little apart, calm and cold as a statue.

Conway is a wonderfully handsome man, and Zai worships his beauty. The more she looks at him the more she craves for a gleam of love in his brown eyes – the stronger grows her desire to listen to love from his well-cut lips; but she listens in vain.

“Yes, I know all that,” she says very wearily, with a dreadfully heart-sick feeling of disappointment, “it was hardly worth while you telling me. I have heard papa and mamma, and Gabrielle, and all the others talk of ‘common sense,’ but one grows tired sometimes of hearing the same thing.”

The tone of her voice tells more than her words; there is a betraying quiver in it that makes him turn quickly and look at her.

The eyes that meet his own have great glittering tears in them. Never in her life has Zai looked more lovely or more lovable than at this moment, and Carl recognises fully all that he is sacrificing for money.

“Forgive me for having repeated anything then that wearies you,” he says softly, clasping her cold white hand in his own, and Zai lets him. Even now – even now! in spite of his falsity – his avariciousness – the touch of his hand thrills her through and through, and her white lissom fingers linger in his grasp. “Zai, my darling! you must feel that it is as hard – much more hard indeed – for me to utter than for you to hear. Good Heavens! do you imagine I am thinking of myself? (For a moment, perhaps, he really fancies he is not.) It is of you, my dearest, that I think. How can I be so cruel – so selfish as to ask you to give up for me everything that you have been taught all your life to consider worth possessing? But if you really wish to do so, Zai, I can only say that you will make me very happy. And, darling, you know I shall strive very earnestly to keep you from regretting it!”

Brave words these are and bravely spoken, with not a single falter in the tone – not a sign of what they cost, but a swift pallor sweeping across his face.

Let us do this worldling credit – let us confess that it is very well done for a man to whom nothing could be more ruinous than to be taken at his word.

But frankly, Carlton Conway has not reckoned without his host. It is a curious rather than an absurd sense of honour that forces him to risk this declaration; but he knows the girl beside him too well not to be almost certain of her reply.

The event justifies the expectation. Zai loves him to distraction, and the loss of him will create a void in her life which she believes no one on this earth will fill up – not if she lives to be as old as Mount Horeb.

Carl’s handsome captivating face tempts her – the most genuine love that a woman can feel tempts her to keep him at any cost.

But it is only for a moment she wavers.

She knows that Mammon and Cupid have run a race in Carl’s heart and that the former has beat by several lengths.

Young, ignorant of guile, and innocent, a sort of instinct teaches her this.

“It is impossible!” she falters, with the sharp thrill in her soul echoing in her voice. “You are perfectly right, Carl, in all you have said, and I – I know it as well as you do. I have been reared under certain conditions and for certain ends, and perhaps I could not put them entirely aside. I am fit for nothing but Society, and Society would not recognise me if I was poor and struggling, so we should simply mar each other’s lives and render each other miserable. And, Carl,” she tries to speak calmly but the effort is terrible, “I could not bear poverty and neither can you, though – ” She breaks down completely, large tears chase one another down her cheeks, but she dashes them away, wroth at herself for her weakness and want of pride. “Therefore we must not think of marrying, of course!”

Another dead pause. Madam Diana sails along more brilliantly than before, this time with an enormous court of glittering stars around her. The cool night air passes quietly by, lifting up the chesnut tendrils of hair that stray on to Zai’s brow and fanning her poor hot temples. The time is flying by, and someone will be coming this way, but nevertheless Carlton Conway cannot end this interview without a few more words.

“And you will of course let Lady Beranger persuade you into marrying Delaval?” he asks, jealously – angrily.

Like the dog in the manger, he does not want the girl himself but he grudges her to another man.

Jealousy is a passion that is often wonderfully independent of the passion of true love.

Carl is very loth indeed that Lord Delaval, whom he has always hated, shall have this lovely piece of nature’s handiwork for his.

“I don’t know,” Zai murmurs wearily. Then she calls up all the high spirit she has in her and says quietly – “After all, the matter might be worse – for Lord Delaval everyone says is charming, you know.”

“But you care nothing for him, Zai! You care for me!” he exclaims passionately, with almost a mind to claim her sooner than she should pass out of his life in this manner.

“I know – and yet – ”

“And yet you may become Countess of Delaval?”

“I may.”

Upon this Carl releases her hand pettishly and subsides into silence. He is not of a nature to ponder deeply on social or any other kind of evils, but just now the sordidness of this strikes him very forcibly, and he wonders how such girls as the Berangers hold themselves even a degree better than the Circassian and Eastern females who sell themselves for filthy lucre.

“Zai, tell me the honest truth. Do you care for Delaval the least bit in the world?” he asks earnestly, longing for her to deny the existence of any liking for his rival, to protest the enormous height and depth and width of her love for himself.

“Not yet – but,” Zai adds slowly and meditatively, “if I marry him I shall do my best to care for him, and even if I didn’t – what of it? Do people in our world deem it necessary to care for the man or the woman whom they marry?”

And Carl Conway cannot honestly affirm that they do.

CHAPTER VII.

THE STATE BALL

“I have hidden my soul out of sight and saidLet none take pity upon thee. NoneComfort thy crying – for lo! thou art dead.Lie still now, safe out of the sight of the sun;Have I not built thee a grave, and wroughtThy grave-clothes on thee of grievous thought?”

The June sun is full of pranks to-day. There it is, scorching up the leaves in the square, broiling the toilers on the white pavements, shining down on everything with a lurid glare that makes one wink and blink, and generally uncomfortable, and now it is peering into the windows of Baby’s schoolroom, showing up the short-comings of the faded carpet, the ink stains on the old table, and streaming full on to a corner where, before her easel, Zai stands, palette and brush in hand, but idle.

“Oh, it is hot! hot!” she cries impatiently, throwing down her painting apparatus and pushing her hair back from her forehead.

“Here’s something to cool you!” Gabrielle says, throwing across the Morning Post, and then she has the good feeling to pick up a book and pretend to be buried in its contents, while Zai reads what she considers her death warrant.

“A marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place between Miss Meredyth, daughter of John Meredyth, Esq., of Eaton Place, and Carlton Conway, Esq.”

Three times Zai reads the announcement over – mechanically spelling each word – then she drops the paper on the floor, and going up to the open window, looks out.

She does not find the sun hot now, although it is dancing on her chesnut hair, and turning each tress to fire. Her heart lies so dreadfully cold within her breast that it seems to ice her whole frame, and though her eyes face the strong yellow beams, they do not shrink from them.

Since she read the words in to-day’s Post, she seems to be blind and deaf to everything, save the fact that Miss Meredyth has won from her that which she valued most in life.

“Well, Zai?”

Zai has been standing at the window perfectly motionless for half an hour, her slight figure almost rigid, her head a little thrown back, her face white as marble and almost as impassive, her two little hands clasped behind her as in a vice, and Gabrielle thinks it high time to recall her to a sense of everyday life with all its ills.

“Well, Gabrielle!”

The girl turns and faces her step-sister; her eyes look as if she were stunned, but her lips smile.

Gabrielle stares at her for a moment, then she bends over her volume again.

“There, child, don’t act with only me for an audience!” she says quietly, “You have had enough of acting and actors, goodness knows. What a brute the man has been!”

“Why?” Zai asks defiantly.

“Why? – because he pretended to love you, and he knew you loved him, and yet he has quietly bowled you over for that doll of a thing.”

“He cannot help himself, Gabrielle!”

“Why cannot he help himself, pray?”

“Because Carl is so poor. Oh, Gabrielle! Gabrielle!” and, the tension passed, Zai throws herself down on Baby’s favourite hearth-rug and sobs as if her heart would burst. “What an awful, awful thing money is!”

“The want of it, you mean! But that man Conway knew he was poor always. Why did he ever spoon you as he has done?”

“He loved me so – he could not help it!” Zai says tenderly, “And we love each other dreadfully —dreadfully– still, but he thinks I should suffer so if I did not have the luxury I have been accustomed to all my life!”

“And he does not think about himself, poor dear unselfish fellow!” Gabrielle says with a little sneer. “Zai, take my advice, and don’t waste another thought on him. He is going to marry Miss Meredyth for her money, let him, and don’t let Miss Meredyth have the pleasure of seeing that you envy her her husband!”

“I must try and forget Carl,” Zai murmurs feebly. “It would be a sin to love him when he is married, but I don’t know how to begin. He seems to run in my head and my heart so!”

“Let some other genus homo turn him out of them. There’s heaps of eligibles about. Lord Walsingham, for instance, he is young, good-looking and tolerably well off.”

“Why he squints, Gabrielle! and has red hair!” Zai protests mildly.

“Never mind. What does it matter whether one’s husband has red hair and a squint? All one wants is a nice house, and fine carriages and horses, plenty of diamonds etc. Is there no other man you know who could make you forget that actor fellow?”

“No one!”

Zai blushes crimson. There is meaning lurking in Gabrielle’s manner and eyes, although her words are simple enough, and she remembers that this step-sister of hers has resolved to win Lord Delaval for herself.

Let her, Zai thinks; she has never felt so much distaste to accepting Lord Delaval’s offer as she does at this moment, when her heart is so sore and her spirit so humiliated.

“I won’t cry any more!” she exclaims, feigning to be indifferent, but in reality anxious to change the subject. “I must look well before the Royalties to-night, you know! The Prince was very nice to me at Caryllon House, and said I was the belle of the room! What are you going to wear, Gabrielle?”

“Black lace – and you, I suppose, are going to wear sackcloth and ashes!”

“No I am not!” Zai answers lightly. “Mamma coaxed Swaebe out of another six months’ credit, and so Trixy and Baby and I have loves of pale blue faille and white illusion, and water lilies trailing all over us. I want to look beautiful to-night for a reason.

“What reason?” Gabrielle asks, suspiciously.

“Only because – But no; it’s a secret for the present.” And Zai, running out hastily, rushes up to her bedroom, and, double locking her door, cries to her heart’s content.

They are about the last tears dedicated to the memory of Carlton Conway; but, by-and-by, she bathes her eyes in cold water and smoothes her hair, and putting on her hat, goes out into the Square. But the Square is associated in her mind indelibly with that evening when she stole out from Lady Beranger’s ball to meet her faithless lover, and rising hastily from the bench, she walks home again.

“Go and lie down, Zai, and rest yourself; you look like a ghost!” Lady Beranger says harshly, meeting her on the stairs. “Or better still, put on your white chip hat with the pink roses, and come with me to the Park. The air will beautify you, perhaps.”

And Zai – who has learned by this time that Lady Beranger’s suggestions are really fiats – goes up and adorns herself, and is quite bewitching in the chip and roses by the time the Victoria is at the door.

Lady Beranger leans back, a trifle pale, and with the soupçon of a frown on her brow, and the carriage is just at Hyde Park Gate before she volunteers a remark.

“You have seen the Post to-day?” she says, carelessly.

“Yes, Mamma, and I am so glad to see Mr. Conway is going to be married; Crystal Meredyth is very nice, and awfully rich, you know.”

Lady Beranger turns round slowly and fixes her keen searching eyes on her daughter.

But Zai has not been born and bred in Belgravia for nothing.

Not a lash quivers – not a change of colour comes – under the scrutiny.

“I always said Carlton Conway was a cad!” her ladyship observes coldly; “and I am very glad you have found it out too.”

“But I haven’t, Mamma, not the least in the world. I think quite as well of Mr. Conway as ever.”

Zai’s self-possession amazes and almost annoys Lady Beranger. She is positively out-Heroding Herod! But she only says, in a cold, hard voice:

“Think as well of him as you like, Zai, so long as you keep it to yourself. His sort of people are all very nice in their proper places, but I have never advocated their being in Society. There is the individual in question!”

Zai looks eagerly round, and her cheeks glow crimson and then wax pale, and she bites her lips to stay their trembling, as the Meredyths’ high Barouche with stepping roans dashes by, having for its freight only Miss Meredyth and her fiancé! (Mrs. Meredyth, not so scrupulous as Lady Beranger about the bienséances, thinks there is no harm in an engaged couple being seen alone in the Park.)

Miss Meredyth, dressed in rose colour, with a sailor’s hat perched coquettishly on her fair hair, looks uncommonly pretty, and so Carlton Conway seems to think, for he is so engrossed in regarding her that the Berangers’ Victoria is passed unnoticed.

“I thought it was the Meredyth girl’s money the man was after, but he seems to be énormément épris,” Lady Beranger remarks indifferently, hoping the shaft will fly straight home and cure all remaining nonsense in her daughter’s head, or heart, or wherever it may be.

Zai answers nothing. With a sharp pang of misery and jealousy, she, too, has noticed how devoted Carl seems. Après cela le Déluge.

She is thankful when her mother orders “Home.” She is sick of bowing and smiling when she would like to lie down and die; but nevertheless she trips airily down to the dining-room, eats more dinner than is her habit, and after this goes into the conservatory and plucks a couple of the reddest roses she can find.

“Fanchette, make me awfully pretty to-night!” she coaxes, and the femme de chambre is nothing loth. Zai has every “possibility,” as she calls it, of being belle comme un ange, and more than satisfies her exquisite Parisian taste when her toilette is complete.

“She wants but two little wings to make her a veritable angel,” Fanchette says to the English maid who assists her in her duties. “Mees Zai is the flower of the house!”

“Flower of the flock, you mean,” Jane corrects.

“No, I do not,” Fanchette replies, offended. “I have never heard of flowers in a flock. I have heard of a flock of goose – and you are one of them.”

Meanwhile, Zai stands before her mirror. Her eyes are so sad – so sad, that they look too large for her small white face.

“Oh, Carl! Carl!” she says, half aloud, “you have forgotten me quite! And I love you – love you so much that my heart is broken, Carl!”

“Zai, the carriage is ready,” cries Baby, drumming her knuckles on the closed door.

Zai starts guiltily. What right has she to be murmuring love words to a man who will soon be another woman’s husband!

She clasps a pearl necklace round her throat, fastens a pearl star into her bonnie brown hair, then pauses one moment.

It is the first time in her life that she has ever had recourse to the foreign aid of ornament, and it seems quite an awful thing to her. But no one must guess at her feelings from her wan face to-night. She had not been proud with Carl because she loved him so, but she must be proud with the world, and not wear her poor desolate heart on her sleeve for daws to peck at.

She takes the two roses she plucked, pulls off their petals mercilessly, then rubs them on her cheeks, and flinging on her cloak she runs downstairs.

Lady Beranger is putting the finishing touches to her elaborate dress of primrose satin and point de Flandre, in which she looks like an empress, and only the three girls are assembled in the hall when Zai appears.

“How do I look?” she asks, throwing off her wrap. “Fanchette says I look belle comme un ange, and I want to be especially beautiful to-night!”

“What for?” three voices ask at once. “It’s only a State Ball, on the pattern of all the others we have been to. The Queen won’t be there to make anything different. So what on earth does it signify how you look?”

“I’ll tell you!” Zai says slowly and deliberately and unflinchingly. The rose petals hide the pallor on her cheeks, and the smile on her lips does away with the sadness in her eyes. “But, girls, you must keep it a secret from the Governor and Mamma. I want to look my very best to-night, because I intend to make my bow before the Princess as a future Peeress!”

Lady Beranger enters at this moment.

The State Ball is worth seeing after all, though the Beranger girls had said that it was exactly on the same pattern as its predecessors, and that Her Gracious Majesty was not going to shed the light of her august presence to make it any different.

Seldom within four walls has more beauty been gathered than to-night. Of course everyone admires the Princess most, but of feminine loveliness there is every possible variety to suit every possible taste.

There is also a good deal of the feminine element which is not lovely. But, as if to atone for Dame Nature’s shortcomings, it is generally expensively dressed.

Zai soon has cause to forget or despise Fanchette’s soothing doctrine of the fitness of things, and to feel that her pale blue faille and white illusion, garnished with water lilies, are chiefly remarkable for their fresh simplicity, as she views the superb silks and satins and laces that do honour to Royalty.

She dances away with half-a-dozen of the Household Brigade, with the Duke of Shortland, Lord Walsingham, and several Belgravian habitués, and then she walks through the room with Percy Rayne.

He is quite as good as a catalogue in a ball-room. Ever since he was a small boy Fate has hung him about the Court of St. James’. He has the names of the upper current, and all the social celebrities, on the tips of his well-shaped nails, and faces he never forgets. Added to these, he has all the fashionable gossip on his tongue, for in the interludes of “business” at the F.O., as well as at the other “O’s,” they enjoy a dish of scandal as much as the softer sex do.

He points out the Beauties now to Zai, who, in spite of her heart-broken condition, regards them with admiring interest.

“There!” he says, “is an American, Mrs. Washington Ulysses Trotter, called the Destroying Angel, because she kills everyone dead, from Princes downward, by a glance of her beautiful eyes; but, unfortunately for her, her triumphal car will be probably stopped in its career. The Yankees are going out of fashion, you know. Royalty has decreed it. For Royalty, like common flesh, is liable to get bothered with being run after and accosted as if it were Jack or Tom or Harry. But Mrs. Washington Ulysses Trotter does not mind much. She knows her little outing at Buckingham Palace is quite enough to get her the entrée into all the Fifth Avenue houses. She will talk about the Prince —